#liter

It's important that we invest in America - literally. The terrorists wanted to destroy our economy, and we can't let our system fall apart. We also have to invest in one another. ↗

— Madeleine Albright

#america #another #apart #destroy #economy

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell. ↗

— Antonin Artaud

#ever #except #get #hell #invented

I began as a boy with artistic talent... as a visual artist... I thought that was what I'd become and in my late teens drifted into reading serious literature. ↗

— Russell Banks

#artistic #become #began #boy #drifted

I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#fiction #get #i #influenced #like

Upon the publication of Goethe’s epic drama, the Faustian legend had reached an almost unapproachable zenith. Although many failed to appreciate, or indeed, to understand this magnum opus in its entirety, from this point onward his drama was the rule by which all other Faust adaptations were measured. Goethe had eclipsed the earlier legends and became the undisputed authority on the subject of Faust in the eyes of the new Romantic generation. To deviate from his path would be nothing short of blasphemy. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#classics #drama #faust #faust-legend #faustian

Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there. ↗

— Bernie Mcgill

#historical-fiction #ireland #irish #literary-fiction #mother

Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way. ↗

— Flannery O'Connor

#william-sessions #destruction

Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible. ↗

— Bart D. Ehrman

#bible #criticism #literature #skepticism #atheism

We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#books #brightness #dejan-stojanovic #glow #literature

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we has a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength. And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of and old idea the Revelation and the World. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#beauty